Another factor vital to the discussion of the genocide are the closed Ottoman archives. The archives have been closed to the general public and despite request from the international community, Turkey had refused to make them available to academics conducting research into the events which had taken place during the period of 1914-1922. In 1989, the Turkish government announced that the archives would be opened for "academic studies in the archives related to the Armenians". The archives, however, proved far from "open". Ara Sarafian, a scholar within the field and specialist in late Ottoman and modern Armenian history, had the opportunity to investigate a number of documents in the Ottoman archives before he was declared persona non grata (together with his German colleague Hilmar Kaiser) for accessing them. In an article, he describes his experience during this "personal odyssey": "The Turkish archive authorities reserve the right to hold on to all documents and only grant access to some. The contents of the documents are read in advance before they are handed out to the researcher and the archive authorities can decide not to deliver the material. The researcher can be denied access simply because 1) the document in question is outside the field of the researcher's declared field of study; 2) the documents cannot be found; 3) the material that they have found is too fragile or 4) the material is under special treatment (whatever that means)." However, he was able to find encrypted messages proving that the Ottoman government had total control over its subjects; that the Armenians were being systematically deported and annihilated during 1915-1916; and that Talaat Pasha led the deportations through a telegraph network and an obedient government bureaucracy. Soon after he had left Turkey and begun to discuss his results, he was notified that he was no longer welcome in Turkey and was refused access to the Ottoman archives. 6
Even if Turkish academics wished to search for the truth in their own country, both in the archives and among the mass-graves, political pressure is strongly opposed to such research. However, it is not only the pressure from Ankara which has effectively put the Armenian Genocide on hold during recent years. There is curious obstruction from a third party, a nation which one would expect to be among the first to recognise the genocide, namely Israel.
In reality, there are two opposing Israeli camps on the recognition of the genocide, which divide roughly along political and intellectual lines. While several Jewish historians increasingly advocate recognition of the Armenian Genocide, the political powers, both inside Israel and within the Jewish lobby abroad, especially in the USA, are still against such a declaration. The fact is, sadly enough, that after the Turkish lobby in Washington DC, the Jewish lobby is the second most active political lobby propagating against official American recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
Professor Yair Auron, Jewish historian and lecturer in Israel, blames the American lack of recognition on Israeli pressures. 7 According to him, the Holocaust (the Jewish Genocide) plays a central role in Israeli society and within historical circles, increasing in importance as the years progress, and relying on the uniqueness of the Jewish Genocide. Political Israel, he argues, has intentionally repressed and refused to acknowledge the existence of the first genocide of the 20th century. He is not alone in his claims. Other Israeli historians, such as Professor Yehuda Baur and Shlomo Avineri, the former foreign minister of Israel, have openly called the Armenian massacres a genocide. 8
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